Underwater Wall in the Baltic

Jacob Geersen, Marcel Bradtmöller, Jens Schneider von Deimling, and Harald Lübke et al. 2023, 'A submerged Stone Age hunting architecture from the Western Baltic Sea' PNAS February 12, 2024 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2312008121

                  artist's impression of the wall when it was built           

Structures from the Stone Age can provide unique insights into Late Glacial and Mesolithic cultures around the Baltic Sea. Such structures, however, usually did not survive on dry land within the densely populated Central European subcontinent. They are however preserved underwater, the paper discuses a Stone Age megastructure that has preserved under water in the Western Baltic Sea. It seems to have been constructed by hunter–gatherer groups more than 10000 y ago and ultimately drowned during the Littorina transgression at 8500 y B.P. Since then, it remained hidden at the seafloor, leading to its pristine preservation.

The Blinkerwall is a submerged stone structure located on the floor of the Baltic Sea, off the coast of northern Germany near the town of Rerik. Discovered in 2021 during a sonar-mapping training exercise conducted by the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde, the feature has since been identified as a deliberately constructed hunting installation dating to the early Holocene. Current evidence suggests that it represents the oldest known man-made megastructure in Europe, significantly predating the emergence of agriculture and permanent settlement in the region.

The structure lies at a depth of approximately 21 metres and extends for nearly one kilometre. It is composed of several large stones forming a continuous linear alignment, linked and stabilised by more than 1,500 smaller stones. Although the wall is relatively low—generally less than one metre in height—the regularity of its construction strongly indicates human agency. The stones are arranged in a consistent and organised manner that cannot be readily explained by natural geological processes, such as glacial deposition or post-depositional movement on the seabed.

Chronologically, the Blinkerwall is dated to more than 8,500 years ago, with some estimates placing its construction over 10,000 years before present. At the time of its use, the area was not submerged but formed part of a terrestrial landscape inhabited by Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities. Following the end of the last Ice Age, rising sea levels associated with glacial meltwater progressively inundated the Baltic basin, eventually submerging the structure and preserving it beneath marine sediments. The wall therefore provides rare physical evidence of human activity within a landscape that has since been largely erased by post-glacial environmental change.

Functional interpretations of the Blinkerwall suggest that it served as a large-scale hunting aid. Comparable stone alignments are known from other prehistoric and ethnographic contexts, where they are understood as drive walls used to manipulate the movement of herd animals. Such structures exploit the tendency of animals to move parallel to obstacles rather than cross them, allowing hunters to channel herds toward ambush zones, natural bottlenecks, or killing areas. In the early Holocene, reindeer occupied northern Germany and the southern Baltic region, making them the most plausible target species for this installation.

If this interpretation is correct, the Blinkerwall has important implications for understanding social organisation and subsistence strategies among European Mesolithic groups. The construction of a kilometre-long stone feature would have required coordinated labour, planning, and detailed knowledge of both animal behaviour and local topography. This challenges persistent assumptions that hunter-gatherer societies were limited to small-scale, opportunistic interventions in their environments. Instead, the Blinkerwall points to a capacity for long-term landscape modification in support of communal hunting practices.

Beyond its immediate archaeological significance, the Blinkerwall highlights the broader research potential of submerged prehistoric landscapes. Large areas of northern Europe that were once inhabited during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene are now underwater, particularly around the Baltic and North Sea basins. The identification of this structure through remote-sensing techniques demonstrates the value of systematic seabed mapping for detecting traces of early human activity. As such, the Blinkerwall not only contributes to debates about the complexity of Mesolithic societies, but also underscores the likelihood that further large-scale prehistoric constructions remain undiscovered beneath Europe’s coastal waters.

Hancock's Sahara Delusion

Graham Hancock is desperately clinging to the Sahara as one of the places in which his speculated lost Allerød Advanced Antecedent Civilization (LAAAC) "might have" existed. He has recently made the first concrete announcement about his new book (the first after the Flint-Dibble-Joe-Rogan Debate) and reveals his thinking about this.

"The Sahara Desert, green and fertile for 5,000 years following the end of the Ice Age (2012 reference*), is more than twice the size of the Indian subcontinent but has only been the subject of minimal archaeological investigation. Implications in the attached info-image.

 "

Hancock seems confused. His speculated lost Allerød Advanced Antecedent Civilization is supposed to have flourished in... uh, the Allerød (pre-incipient Younger Dryas) warm period after the last ice age.

The Allerød was the latter part of the Bølling-Allerød interstadial (from 14,690 to c. 12,890 years Before Present, during the final stages of the Last Glacial Period), this was a period of major ice sheet collapse and the period begins with a corresponding sea level rise known as Meltwater Pulse 1 (between 14,700 and 13,500 years ago). During this episode, global sea level
 rose between 16 metres and 25 metres in about 400–500 years (4-6 cm a year).

Allerød temperatures (adapted from Obase et al 2012, via wikipedia)

  

This sea rise stabilised with the onset of the Allerod, which was a warm and moist global interstadial that occurred c.13,900 to 12,900 BP, in which temperatures in the northern Atlantic region reached almost present-day levels. But in this period, the actual Sahara was warm and dry. The "Green Sahara" Hancock talks about only came after a while. In the 2012 article he himself cites (!) the early and middle Holocene "African Humid Period (AHP)" is dated to between 11,500–5,000 years ago. In other words the Green Sahara dates to AFTER the end (END) of the Younger Dryas period (Younger Dryas cool period... 12,900–11,700 years ago).

Hancock conflates the whole lot and mixes events millennia apart. He says this lost civilization functioned in the period (i.e., Allerød) in a Green Sahara period before the Younger Dryas began ('with a bang' - he favours comet impact), then the sealevel rose rapidly giving rise to the world's flood legends.

He suggests that archaeologists have not found traces of his LAAAC because but the Sahara Desert "has only been the subject of minimal archaeological investigation". One wonders how he quantifies this. Firstly he seems to fall into the complete novice's misconception that archaeology is "only excavation". One would have thought that after all these years of him attacking archaeologists and their methodology and attempts to question and correct their conclusions, he would have made the effort to understand how archaeology actually works in the 21st century. He clearly has not the foggiest.

As archaeologist Scott D. Haddow (@sdhaddow) has pointed out :

I'm all for exploring more of the Sahara, but only 15-25% of it is covered by sand, the rest is exposed bedrock and gravel plains, so if there were any traces of lost Ice Age cities they'd be exposed on the desert floor and visible in satellite imagery. Exposed bedrock surfaces (hamadas) across the Sahara consistently yield evidence of human occupation dating back to the Paleolithic, but still haven't revealed any signs of a lost Ice Age civilization. Graham's right though: it's no coincidence that the drying up of the Green Sahara led to the emergence of the Predynastic Badari and Naqada cultures of the Nile Valley. Archaeologists have long made this connection. As the Sahara became increasingly arid, nomadic hunters/pastoralists were drawn to the Nile Valley and this eventually led to the development of Dynastic Egyptian culture, pyramids, etc. But this process took over 2000 years - it didn't happen overnight.

As for surveying and locating sites of the pre-Younger Dryas temperate period (c.13,900 to 12,900 BP), let us recall that in Hancock's current homeland, the British Upper Palaeolithic is characterised by the Creswellian Culture dated between 13,000 and 11,800 BP (and was followed by the cold spell, the Younger Dryas, when Britain was at times unoccupied by humans). How many Upper Palaeolithic sites are known from the whole of Great Britain? How extensive are the surveys where layers of this period are exposed on the surface ?

The same goes for the continental areas of western Europe, on the Northern European Plain we have the sites of the Hamburg(ian) culture/technocomplex or (15,500-13,100 BP) and the Federmesser group ('the late Magdalenian') and its variants dating to between 14,000 and 12,800 years ago (and then in the YD, the Ahrensburg(ian) culture (c. 12,900 to 11,700 BP. Again the same question, what acrage of exposed Upper Palaeolithic landscapes of the whole Northern European plain has been systematically surveyed compared with the extensive surveys of deflation areas of the Saharan desert by institutions from many countries that work there? The bibliography of the latter is pretty substantial - yet NONE of it is cited by hancock, who just cherry picks for texts that support his vision. It’s only “minimal” if you don’t bother looking for (or paying competent research assistants to look for) the multiple journal articles, field reports, edited volumes, and full books that cover archaeological surveys, remote survey, and excavations.

Justine “That Woman” Warren @adancingferret 12:23 AM · Nov 25, 2025
It’s only “minimal” if you don’t bother looking for (or paying competent research assistants to look for) the multiple journal articles, field reports, edited volumes, and full books that cover archaeological surveys, remote survey, and excavations.

I have a feeling that the 2027 book is going to be a real hoot. I wonder if the publisher will get an archaeologist as one of the pre-publication referees? 

References

*deMenocal, P. B. & Tierney, J. E. (2012) Green Sahara: African Humid Periods Paced by Earth's Orbital Changes. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):12

Obase, T., Abe-Ouchi, A. & Saito, F. 2021, 'Abrupt climate changes in the last two deglaciations simulated with different Northern ice sheet discharge and insolation'. Sci Rep 11, 22359 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-01651-2

Grifter-Illogic at Baalbek

This visualisation ( © 2009, Dennis R. Holloway Architect) perfectly captures the
setting of these Three Big Stones and the logicality of their siting.

 
The "classical history graduate" YouTuber Mike Button has a new video, this one replaying all the old talking points about Baalbek, Lebanon ("Archaeologists Can’t Solve this Engineering Mystery", Nov 23, 2025). 

At the base of one of Rome's largest temples is a foundation that doesn't make sense. Three stone blocks each weighing 800 tons set seven meters above the ground. This site holds one of the most baffling engineering mysteries in ancient history and the deeper you look the stranger it gets [...] [bla bla]....

Another visualisation of the position of the Three Big Stones
( © 2009, Dennis R. Holloway Architect).

Instead of asking an engineer to "solve the mystery" of these big stones in the front of the western facade of the podium of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus [note the suffixes of the name], he taunts archaeologists that he's found something he assumes they cant explain (but he actually ignores texts that do try to address the problem to avoid having to address the points made). He plumps for the Ancient Sea Kings, the Allerod Antecedant Civilization mythology as an explanation.

I thought I'd challenge him to defend that, by proposing an alternative explanation of my own as a comment under the YouTube video using his own logic (of ignoring "what the archaeologists say", faked incredulity, speculative "what-ifism", and cherry-picking). Let us see the results of him engaging with it. Will he?:

@PortAntissues 18 hours ago
I don’t know if there is a unit on logic in the “ancient history” course at Milton Keynes Agricultural College (or wherever you studied), but your thinking is not at all logical here. Bonkers.

You question the Roman date of archaeologists of the course of stones with the so-called “trilithon” (why do you call it that? They lie flat and NOT in the form of a trilithon). Yet you have no problems in accepting the same archaeologists’ Roman date for the structures above. By your own “logic”, they only “look like” a Roman temple. There may be Roman finds in the soil dumped around them, but that material is a terminus post quem for the layers themselves.

As for the style, we all know that throughout history people have been building ”Roman”-looking architecture [often reusing ancient elements – spolia]. A prime example is the ninth century Palace of Charlemagne in Aachen. The same goes for the Renaissance, Baroque and Roccoco buildings that ape the same basic classical forms and utilize classical elements, Neoclassical architecture (enlightenment to present day – with Donald Trump mandating that even today it’s the ONLY permissible style for public buildings in the USA).

So how do you “know” that the overlying elements are Roman – making the placement of the stones pre-Roman (and then on that base postulating an imaginary “lost civilization”).

If you are proposing alternative (contrarian) interpretations, why are you simply dismissing out of hand that the “Roman temple” above these stones could have been built closely-copying Roman style significantly LATER than the end of classical antiquity? Famously, it is ISLAMIC sources that speak of how stones were moved by "levitation" when building monuments like the pyramids. The Black Stone of the Kaaba was lifted by the clans on cloths, reportedly legends refer to a "magical papyrus" that was placed under some of the heavier stones; when the stones were struck with a metal rod, they would begin to float.

Why are you ignoring the fact that the three big stones of Baalbek (equivalent to the three jamarāt, in the city of Mina – devils = Baal?) COULD have been moved there and set on a raised foundation in early Islamic times, and then a building erected over them in archaizing style to give the impression that they and that foundation below them were older than they are? This may have been part of a sequence of local legends that are now lost. Prove it was not.

WHY did you not examine this hypothesis before simply ignoring it and plumping from one involving an imaginary lost/missing ancient Allerød Antecedant Civilization and thus misleading your viewers on the grounds “I have a degree in ancient history”, as if that gave anything at all compared to a solid grounding in archaeology? 😸😼

And I'll accompany this with a composite screenshot from Google Earth that reveals that what I said about Mecca checks out. The foundation wall below these three big blocks is aligned, actually, pretty precisely, on Mecca. Really. 

So, is his is an HONEST attempt to deconstrruct the Roman building-history of this complex, he needs to address the elephant in the room, that other deconstructions can exist - and until he produces actual evidence and cogent arguments, they are equally valid (and at the same time invaliddate his randomly-preferred "explanation"). 

For the record, I am personally convinced they are the same date as the rest of that wall of the podium and that, together with the bit of wall beneath them, was constructed in Roman times (see also World of Antiquity [David Miano] "Baalbek: Mystery of the Trilithon Stones" Apr 6, 2020).

A question we do not see being asked is (since the Three Big Stones form a logical whole in the  temple podium), what could have been the intended destination of the other two stones left in the quarry?  

The Sumerian King List

David Miano Everything you wanted to know about the Sumerian King List but were afraid to ask. 

Posted on You Tube by World of Antiquity Nov 4, 2021

The Sumerian King List is an ancient Mesopotamian text that records the names of rulers who reigned over Sumer, along with the lengths of their reigns and the locations of their rule. Written in Sumerian and preserved on several clay tablets (the most complete of which is the Weld-Blundell Prism in the Ashmolean Museum), the list begins with kings who supposedly ruled before a great flood and continues through various city-states such as Kish, Uruk, Ur, and Isin. Its early sections attribute impossibly long reigns—lasting tens of thousands of years—to antediluvian kings, blending myth and legend. After the flood, reign lengths become more realistic, reflecting a transition from divine or semi-divine rule to more historical governance.

Beyond its function as a chronicle, the King List served a clear ideological purpose. By presenting kingship as a divinely ordained institution that “descended from heaven,” it legitimized political authority and reinforced the idea of a single, continuous tradition of rule—despite the region’s actual fragmentation and frequent power shifts. Scholars believe it may have been compiled during the early second millennium BCE, likely under the kings of Isin, as a way to assert their legitimacy after the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur. As such, the Sumerian King List is both a valuable historical artifact and a piece of political propaganda, reflecting how ancient Mesopotamians sought to impose order and divine sanction on their complex and often contested political landscape.

The Weld-Blundell Prism chronicles rulers with reigns lasting thousands of years.

Antediluvian Kings

1 Alulim of Eridu: Reigned for 28,800 years.
2 Alalngar of Eridu: Reigned for 36,000 years.
3 En-men-lu-ana of Bad-tibira: Reigned for 43,200 years.
4 En-men-gal-ana of Bad-tibira: Reigned for 28,800 years.
5 Dumuzid, the Shepherd of Bad-tibira: Reigned for 36,000 years.
6 En-sipad-zid-ana of Larak: Reigned for 28,800 years.
7 En-men-dur-ana of Sippar: Reigned for 21,000 years.
8 Ubara-Tutu of Shuruppak: Reigned for 18,600 years. Postdiluvian Kings

After the great flood, the reign lengths become shorter, but some are still quite long by modern standards:

Jushur of Kish: Reigned for 1,200 years.
Kullassina-bel of Kish: Reigned for 960 years.
Nangishlishma of Kish: Reigned for 670 years.
En-tarah-ana of Kish: Reigned for 420 years.
Babum of Kish: Reigned for 300 years.
Puannum of Kish: Reigned for 840 years.
Kalibum of Kish: Reigned for 960 years.
Kalumum of Kish: Reigned for 840 years.
[...]

'Side scan sonar of Atlantis off the coast of Cuba'.

 
'Side scan sonar of Atlantis off the coast of Cuba'.

Old Stories Given Credence by Ignorant Influencers

Continuity. Thousands of years ago, authoritarian elites made up an origins story to legitimate their rule. Now uneducated sheeple in the US enabling another autharitarianism seize upon the very same made-up timelines to legitimise their own beliefs:

Joe Rogan: “I’ve been really fascinated by the Sumerian King List. They’re the ones that have all this crazy stuff with the Anunnaki. It’s this list of people who ran the Earth for tens of thousands of years. Their reign was like tens of thousands of years, and then there’s this huge flood. Afterwards, the timelines become way more—it’s like, he was a king for 50 years. They have it documented to like eight kings over the entire course of their civilization, including the places that these kings ruled that actually exist. These are ancient cities that are actually built on top of even more ancient cities. And they had an understanding of stuff that was way beyond what we thought they were capable of. They have Pythagoras’ theorem 1,000 years before Pythagoras".

Bret Weinstein: “There is this increasingly fascinating thread about a recurrent disaster cycle, and the possibility that sophisticated civilizations get erased and that we rediscover.”

@joerogan @BretWeinstein

Some Things that Work

Anthropologist Chris Kavanagh (@C_Kavanagh), answering Sabine Hossenfelder (August 15th 2025) goes through "some things that work on YouTube" that are to some extent relevant to the pseudoarchaeology issue:

1. Present yourself as a renegade truthteller standing up to a corrupt establishment.

2. Explain that mainstream sources are lying to you, but your channel will provide the hard truths.

3. Imply nefarious forces are trying to censor you.

4. Flatter your audience that by following your channel, they are displaying nuance and independent thinking.

5. Present all criticism as bad faith- ideally, also frame as self-serving efforts to protect funding/authority.

6. Offer 'heterodox' takes that pander to your audience.

7. Make videos about culture war topics and if possible cite figures like Thiel, Musk, and Eric Weinstein.

8. Make some soft jabs at targets your audience likes to demonstrate your independence/lack of bias, but reserve your strongest venom for targets they dislike or disapprove of.

9. Cultivate desired parasocial attention by liking all flattering comments and ignoring/blocking anyone expressing critical opinions.

10. Engage in cross-promotional activities with figures who will endorse your renegade status and provide access to sympathetic audiences.

Lost Civilization of Atlantis, Hyperdiffusionism and Nazis

 

Amazon: Atlantis, Die Urheimat Der Arier Hardcover – 27 October 2022by Zchaetzsch Karl Georg (Author) 

Karl Georg Zschaetzsch (1870–1946) was a German intellectual of the Völkisch movement, closely aligned with ideas later promoted by National Socialism. An Aryanist, he advanced the notion of an Aryan ancestry for all civilizations. He first made his name in 1920 with the publication of Die Herkunft und Geschichte des arischen Stammes [ The Origin and History of the Aryan Tribes], an instant bestseller, followed in 1922 by Atlantis: die Urheimat der Arier [Atlantis the Original Homeland of the Aryans]

In these works, he developed a fantastical prehistory and early history. According to his claims, Atlantis was inhabited by blue-eyed, blond vegetarians, representatives of a superior “Aryan race”. He located this mythical island in the Azores archipelago, where the inhabitants were supposedly hardened by numerous hardships. Before the Great Flood that ultimately swallowed Atlantis, they had already endured famine caused by drought, a storm, and a conflagration triggered by a comet impact. Apart from the “Negroes”, who he claimed were blackened by the conflagration, only three original Aryans survived: an elderly foster father (Wodan), a newborn boy (Thor), and his sister (Freya), who first became his foster mother and then his wife. From this trio, he argued, all later Aryans descended; in biblical tradition, he equated them with God the Father, Adam, and Eve.

The “Germanic race” was thus presented as the heir of the Atlantean population and the dominant race among the Indo-Europeans. Thus, the Goths, Franks, and Saxons were said to have migrated from Atlantis to Central and Western Europe. Aryans, descending from these groups, supposedly conquered the world from their Atlantic homeland and founded settlement colonies across the globe. Much as Graham Hancock was later to claim, wherever Aryan settlers mixed with non-Aryan natives, advanced civilizations arose: Egypt, Mesopotamia, ancient Athens, Peru, and others. From Northern Europe, the last “pure” Aryans allegedly spread through Germania and the Baltic region to Southern Europe, Africa, and Asia, where they continued to intermarry. The original Greeks were also, in his view, descended from the Aryans, and the Incas of Peru, the organizers of a vast, centralized state, were likewise said to originate from Atlantis. Yet, he claimed, these civilizations ultimately declined because of continued racial mixing.

There were inconsistencies. Elsewhere in his work, however, based on a particular reading of Jordanes, Zschaetzsch placed Atlantis in Scandinavia, equating it with the Vagina Gentum described as the original homeland of the Goths. According to Zschaetzsch, the Aryans were eventually driven from their Atlantic homeland by non-Aryan immigrants after bitter battles and forced to migrate to Northern Europe. These newcomers then attacked the Mediterranean region, ancient Athens and Egypt, but were decisively defeated by the Athenians. This is of course the war referred to by Plato in Timeus and Critias. 

Zschaetzsch’s ideas about Atlantis were among the most extreme examples of the grotesquely racist zeitgeist. They were quickly taken up by Völkisch ideologues. Alfred Rosenberg initially adopted this thesis as well, but it never gained significant traction, since the hypothesis of an Atlantean origin for the Germanic populations was widely regarded as unserious (Chapoutot 2008, p. 46).

As another parallel with Hancock, for his theoretical construct, Zschaetzsch appropriated not only Greek mythology but also the Jewish-biblical tradition, ancient American mythologies, and most pre-Christian pagan cults and festivals, all of which he interpreted as distorted versions of an alleged Atlantean prehistory.

He went on to publish further racist writings with the Aryan Publishing House, often featuring similarly absurd claims or based on comparable constructs, such as his onomastic speculations in Uralte Sippen- und Familiennamen (Ancient Family and Clan Names, 1934). After the fourth, revised edition of Atlantis, Urheimat… appeared in 1937, his trail went cold.

In 1946, the Berlin Magistrate classified Zschaetzsch as a Nazi genealogist and ordered his entire output permanently removed, placing his works on the list of banned literature. This did not prevent his writings (together with similar works by authors such as Heinrich Pudor, Herman Wirth, and Siegfried Kadner) from continuing to circulate positively in far-right circles as identity-forming pseudo-history.

Further Reading
Johann Chapoutot 2008, 'Le nazisme et l'Antiquité', Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

Franz Wegener, 'Das atlantidische Weltbild: Nationalsozialismus und Neue Rechte auf der Suche nach dem versunkenen Atlantis' (Gladbeck: Kulturförderverein Ruhrgebiet, 2000), series Politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, Abt. 1: Das Wasser; 3rd, greatly expanded ed., 2014.